NewPages Blog

It’s no secret that I am particularly drawn to music and lyrics and can find myself being inspired by them. Whether it’s a particular turn of phrase that seems magical, a sung truth that cuts to the very core, or just an idea that gets me questioning or thinking—music stays with me. For a long time, the lyrics “That was a river / this is the ocean” seemed to haunt my mind.

What better fodder for inspiration than to consider bodies of water and compare them to emotional depths?

In the song by Colin Raye, these words offer a masterclass in emotional scale. Encountering an old flame, the singer reassures his wife that his past feelings were merely a river, while his current devotion is the ocean. It’s a striking image: a river has a beginning and an end; it follows a set path. But an ocean is an ecosystem. It is deep, immeasurable, and powerful enough to reshape the very coastline of our lives.

The World of Emotional Waterways

Imagine, for a moment, a world where our internal landscapes were literal. In this reality, emotions aren’t just felt—they are quantified by volume, flow, and depth.

• The Droplet: A fleeting moment of affection, easily evaporated.
• The Brook: A light infatuation, noisy and cheerful, but shallow enough to walk through.
• The River: A serious attachment. It has a strong current and a clear direction, but it is ultimately contained by its banks.
• The Ocean: True, transformative love. It is a vast expanse where you can no longer see the shore you left behind.

In such a world, how would we talk to one another? Would we warn friends of a “flash flood” of grief? Consider the tension that arises when someone offering an “ocean” of commitment meets someone experiencing an emotional “drought.”

Creative Prompt: Map Your Current

Whether you are a writer, painter, or digital artist, use this “Hydrology of the Heart” to create something new this week.

The Challenge: Write, draw, paint, or collage something that treats emotions as waterways—measurable, navigable, and capable of reshaping the land around them. What happens when your “ocean” meets someone else’s “river”?

Never Miss a Spark of Inspiration

If this prompt got your creative gears turning, you’ll love what we send out every week. Writing is a solitary journey, but you don’t have to scout the terrain alone.

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get inspiration prompts like this delivered straight to your inbox, along with:

• The Latest Literary News: Stay updated on new book releases and must-read literary magazines.
• Curated Bookstores: Discover independent gems to visit on your next trip.
• A Sampling of Submission Opportunities: All subscribers receive a small sampling of current submission opportunities from literary magazines, upcoming events, and indie publishers

🔓 Unlock 100+ Submission Opportunities

Ready to see your name in print? Paying subscribers receive exclusive early access to a curated database of 100+ submission opportunities. Every single lead is vetted by our team before posting, so you can spend less time researching and more time writing.

Due to the passing of a loved one, I have been spending more and more time jumping through what feels like the “phone Olympics” whenever I need to handle affairs or set things up. Going through the often-frustrating phone menu systems, waiting on hold only to get cut off before ever reaching a person, or even dealing with people who just refuse to be kind and helpful—it got me thinking about that little old thing we know as the dial tone.

How can that hollow sound be used to inspire your writing and art?

Inspiration Prompt: A Dial Tone Conversation

In an era of instant messaging and constant connectivity, the act of making a phone call has become a strange, often frustrating ritual. We navigate endless automated menus, parley with digital “gatekeepers,” and endure hold music that feels like it’s looping into eternity.

But there is a specific, haunting moment in this process that we rarely stop to examine: the dial tone.

The Echo of Something Unfinished

What happens when the promise of a human voice falls through? You wait through the ringing, hoping for a “hello,” only to be met with that flat, rhythmic hum. In that moment, the connection is severed, leaving you in a digital limbo.

To some, that sound is the ultimate symbol of modern isolation—a reminder of the barriers between us and the help or companionship we seek. To others, it might be a moment of relief, a sudden exit from a conversation they weren’t ready to have.

Ask yourself:

• Is the dial tone the end of a conversation, or the start of one that never happened?
• Is it a lonely sound, or a blank canvas?
• What does the “machine gatekeeper” say about how we value each other’s time?

We want you to take this feeling—the frustration, the rhythm, or the silence—and turn it into art. Let the dial tone speak through your preferred medium:

• Fiction: Write a story that begins the moment the line goes dead.
• Poetry: Capture the cadence of the dial tone in your meter.
• Visual Art: Create a collage or photograph that represents “the machine gatekeeper.”
• Multimedia: Compose a short track or film centered around the drone of a disconnected line.

Creative Tip: Sometimes the best work comes from the most mundane frustrations. If you’re feeling stuck, try recording a dial tone and listening to it for three minutes. What images come to mind?

Never Miss a Spark of Creativity

If you found value in this prompt, there is plenty more where that came from. Our community thrives on the intersection of literature, art, and the tiny moments of daily life that inspire them.

Join our community by subscribing to our weekly newsletter. Get inspiration like this delivered straight to your inbox every week, along with:

• 📚 New Book Releases
• 📖 New Lit Mag Issues
• 📍 Bookstore Updates
• 📝 Submission Opportunities

Resolutions for the New Year? We’ve done that. Reviewing 2025? Covered. So how do we start 2026 off right? By chasing the concept of fresh.

One of my favorite moments in the Anne of Green Gables miniseries (with Megan Follows as Anne) is when her teacher reminds her that “tomorrow is always fresh, with no mistakes in it… yet.” Isn’t that the perfect spark for inspiration?

Inspiration Prompt: Fresh

Forget the resolutions destined to fizzle by February. Instead, picture this: a day that hasn’t asked anything of you yet. No mistakes—yet. No worn edges. Just possibility, bright and uncreased.

This week’s challenge is to capture that sense of renewal. Begin with something newly emerging—a scent, a bruise, a rumor, a memory resurfacing, a sprout breaking soil, a relationship resetting, a place you’ve returned to after too long away. Let “freshness” be more than newness: explore what is raw, recently touched, just‑changed, or changed again.

Ask yourself:

• How does something become fresh?
• How does it lose that quality?
• What happens in the moment the world feels washed clean—or when you wish it would?

Write, sketch, compose, or collage from that first spark of renewal or disruption. Let your work carry the bright sting of something just beginning.

💡 Want prompts like this delivered every week?
Subscribe to our newsletter for fresh inspiration, new lit mag issues, book recommendations, and submission opportunities for writers and artists across genres.
👉 Subscribe now

How do you use the season as inspiration without using the season as inspiration? It’s a tricky question.

The winter holiday season seems to elbow its way into our lives earlier every year—lights appearing before the leaves have even fallen, carols echoing long before snow arrives. But creative inspiration shouldn’t feel like a force‑feed. So how do we tap into the richness of this time of year without drowning in holiday spirit we never asked for?

Then it dawned on me: snow globes.

These little baubles come in every imaginable shape and size, and so many of them aren’t tied to holidays at all. They can be playful, eerie, nostalgic, surreal, or downright strange. When I was in elementary school, we made our own snow globes—baby food jars filled with glitter and miniature winter scenes. They were messy, handmade, and wildly charming. And honestly? What better raw material for creative work is there?

Plus, if you’re feeling adventurous, you can blend the literary with the literal and craft your own snow globe as part of your writing ritual. (Highly recommended.)

Inspiration Prompt: Snow Globe

Imagine a world small enough to hold, yet vast enough to transform you.

There’s something irresistibly enchanting about a snow globe. Glitter drifting like slow‑falling stars. Tiny houses and trees arranged just so. Whole towns frozen mid‑breath—every window aglow, every path untraveled. Turn the globe in your hands and time seems to pause. Shake it, and the sky erupts in a private blizzard. These little worlds invite us to wonder what it might feel like to live inside a universe bound by glass.

For this week’s creative experiment, sink into that magic—then unsettle it.

What if you woke one morning and found yourself inside a snow globe?

Outside forces—hands much larger than your own—disturb the ground whenever your world is tilted or rattled. Maybe you learn to read weather patterns based on someone else’s mood. Maybe tremors become a language; maybe glitter becomes prophecy.

What sounds fill such a place? What does warmth mean when it comes only from a hidden light under plastic snow?

Or picture your own city sealed inside an invisible dome.

Snow tumbles steadily from a cloudless sky. Year‑round drifts bury familiar landmarks. The ground gives small, frequent shudders. Daylight bends oddly, refracted against an unseen, curved boundary—enough to make shadows behave like strangers.

Do people adapt? Resist? Celebrate? How long before your community begins to wonder whether you’re being observed?

And consider this twist:

Someone from a place without winter—a desert, a humid coastline, a dry savanna—is suddenly thrust into this permanent blizzard.

What does cold mean to someone who has never felt it? What memories become useless? What new skills or survival instincts sharpen under pressure? How might such a climate, relentless and alien, reshape identity, relationships, or a sense of home?

Your invitation this week:

Write into the wonder. Sketch into the distortion. Collage into the beauty. Photograph the unease.

Your medium doesn’t matter—only your curiosity does. Explore how environments transform us, how confinement distorts perception, how a small world can become limitless when imagination cracks the glass.

What changes in this miniature world?
What becomes newly possible?

✨ If prompts like this ignite something in you, our weekly newsletter delivers fresh inspiration—along with curated submission opportunities, upcoming literary and writing events, indie bookstore news, new lit mag issues, book news, and more.

Subscribe and let your writing week begin with a spark.

They say that in life there are only a few certainties: death and taxes. None of us truly knows when death will come knocking, though some people face its approach with more clarity because of illness. For most of us, though, the moment remains invisible until it has already passed.

This past Thanksgiving, my family experienced one of those invisible thresholds for the second time. The holiday dinner—familiar, warm, full of our usual stories—became a last supper with the beloved patriarch of our family. No one saw it coming. That suddenness, that unexpected finality, brought this idea sharply into focus:

What if this meal became the last with someone you loved? How would that change the way you saw the moment? And what new understandings might emerge when you look back?

These questions form the heart of this week’s inspiration prompt.

Inspiration Prompt: The Last Supper

There’s a quiet mystery at the heart of every family table: we never know which shared meal will be the last with someone we love. We pass dishes, refill drinks, laugh at familiar jokes, and settle into well-worn rhythms—never imagining that a seemingly ordinary evening might become a final chapter.

And yet, when we look back, it’s often the unremarkable moments that take on unexpected weight. A holiday dish that won’t be made again. A story retold for the hundredth time, suddenly cherished because it will never be told the same way. A chair left empty next year. These details, small and human, become the symbols we hold onto long after the meal has ended.

This tension—between presence and memory, between the living moment and what endures—creates fertile ground for art.

When the Ordinary Turns Sacred

Think of a dinner that felt like every other. The clink of utensils. The hum of conversation. Maybe the TV murmuring in the background or a candle sputtering in its glass. Nothing dramatic. Nothing staged.

And yet, inside that moment, something was already shifting. Maybe the person across the table looked a little more tired than usual. Maybe they lingered longer over a story. Maybe the only sacred thing was that everyone was together—something you wouldn’t realize mattered until years later.

These are the thresholds where the ordinary becomes sacred, where the mundane becomes myth.

Symbols That Stay With Us

Symbols emerge without our choosing:

• A favorite dish someone made every year, crafted one last time
• A joke that breaks the table into laughter and somehow becomes a benediction
• Hands passing bread, touching briefly, unknowingly
• The way someone bowed their head before eating
• A piece of music playing softly in the background, forever tied to that night

These fragments become the reliquaries of memory. They are the objects and gestures through which we understand a person’s legacy—not in grand declarations, but in the undramatic, deeply human shape of a shared meal.

An Invitation to Create

This week, consider exploring that threshold between presence and memory in your creative practice.

Imagine a meal that becomes eternal.
Not because anyone knew it was the last, but because the echoes of that night continue to resonate.

You might write a story about a family gathering where every detail becomes a vessel of meaning.

You might craft a poem that holds the ache of endings in one hand and the tenderness of remembrance in the other.

You might paint a table set with symbolic objects, or photograph an empty chair and the light that falls across it.

You might capture the hum of grief and grace in a piece of music.

Whatever your medium, let it hold both sides of the threshold:
the ache of something ending, and the quiet hope of what endures.

Because in every “last supper,” there’s a kind of immortality—not in the meal itself, but in the love that gathers around it.

Enjoying the prompt? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get fresh inspiration delivered to your inbox along with new issues of lit mags, book releases, and submission opportunities.

Subscribe here